


i taste what i can never have

by Zayz



Category: Scandal (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-14
Updated: 2013-05-14
Packaged: 2017-12-11 19:56:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,688
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/802610
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zayz/pseuds/Zayz
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Fitz/Olivia, circa 2x14. He loves her and she loves him, but it's not enough.</p>
            </blockquote>





	i taste what i can never have

* * *

i taste what i can never have  
By: Zayz

  
_I know I'm alone if I'm with or without you,_   
_But just being around you offers me another form of relief_   
_When the loneliness leads to bad dreams,_   
_And the bad dreams lead me to calling you,_   
_And I call you and say "C'mere!"_   


  
_And it's bad news, baby, I'm bad news_   
_I'm just bad news, bad news, bad news_   


  
_'Cause you're just damage control_   
_For a walking corpse like me, like you,_   
_'Cause we'll all be portions for foxes._   
_Yeah, we'll all be portions for foxes_   


\- Rilo Kiley, "Portions for Foxes"

* * *

He tries, he tries. In the dark of the night, when the rest of the world is asleep, he sits with his poisons of choice and he tries. Tries to let her go. Tries to figure out where it went wrong. And when that doesn't work, he tries not to internally combust, as he admits defeat, and lets himself remember.

* * *

He tries his hardest, but he can't pinpoint the exact moment Oliva Pope stopped being a woman he platonically admired, and became the woman he wanted to spend the rest of his life with. It's like he went from the start of the maze, to the end of it, and the middle got erased along the way until he looked back and stared at the abyss and had nothing to go on, no evidence, no visible trajectory to track where everything went off the rails. All he has is a throb in his heart and an ache in his gut, an ache that leaves him breathless.

It has been years and years and years since such an ache rocked his body, made him feel like a teenager again. It's a vaguely familiar feeling – maybe he had felt it before, maybe once upon a time, in the earliest days of their marriage, Mellie inspired this in him – but that comparison is almost laughable now, because it's like comparing a cheap lightbulb to the might of the sun.

Because Olivia is, undoubtedly, the sun in his life. And Fitz is just the simple green earth that grows under her luminance.

* * *

It was innocent, for a few months. A sweet tiny thing that made him feel a little brighter on cold, gray dawns, trudging along to his next engagement. She was like his morning cup of coffee, perking him up with her clacking heels and her confident smile.

He found himself standing a little straighter when she approached. It was a treat, when she came around; it meant a small break from Mellie hovering around him, Mellie smiling and happily chatting strategy, Mellie talking, talking, talking, without seeming to say much of anything.

Unlike Mellie, Olivia was captivating. Her words mattered. She was an efficient general of the Fitzgerald Grant campaign, handling every foreseeable problem quickly and elegantly. Cyrus, of course, raved about her every minute he got. Raved about what a gem, a catch, a rare find she was, how lucky they were to have her.

Fitz readily agreed to that. He was lucky to have her. And Cyrus raving – that was lucky too, because it gave him an excuse to talk about her, to release some of that bouncy energy she always seemed to unlock in him. Like he was thirteen years old gushing to his best friend about the smartest girl in the room.

Except, at thirteen, he could have asked her out for ice cream and done homework with her after school. Now, he had to settle for savoring the few minutes he got alone with her, when she prepped him for appearances and speeches and goodness knows what else.

To be fair, they did spend late nights talking tactics and policies over whatever leftovers happened to be in the mini-fridge – and usually cherry popsicles, because they were Fitz's favorite – and it _was_ kind of like ice cream and homework.

Except she was going on about demographic information and polling results and upcoming interviews, and he was a fully-grown man running for President of the United States, and he could hear Mellie snoring softly two seats behind them, snoring steadily all through the night, as though she and her nostrils were onto him, and reminding him that she still very much existed.

* * *

Everyday, Olivia wore the silly "Grant for President" pin that they passed out at all the events. It aligned her with the campaign, and showed her support, and somehow managed to match with every outfit she wore.

But that wasn't why he liked seeing her wear it.

In truth— she always pinned it on the left lapel, and it gave him a kick because it meant that he was close to her heart during her every waking hour.

* * *

Maybe those kinds of thoughts should have been a wake-up call, a warning that this was escalating for him, and fast. Maybe he should have been more vigilant, more thoughtful, about how this could potentially ruin him. Cyrus was, after all, always getting on him for locating his weaknesses, and finding ways to conquer them.

But Cyrus went on about a lot of things, and there was a lot to do on a campaign trail, a lot of hand-shaking and community-servicing and speech-making and picture-taking. His face hurt every night from all of the smiling. And Fitz just got tired, tired of being a hawk about every little thing the way Cyrus was.

Really, he just got used to Cyrus and Olivia and the rest of the staff taking care of everything for him, sniffing out every weakness and taking care of it before it even crossed his mind. He got used to being handled. So he got complacent about the only thing he had to handle himself – and that's how sweet little crushes become full-blown cancers.

* * *

Because she was, in many ways, a cancer.

A few years ago, when his favorite aunt had had breast cancer, he spent a whole night reading a biology textbook, even though science had always bored and confused him, trying to understand what exactly was terrorizing his aunt's body.

He read about how the cell normally had checkpoints as it grew and divided, in order to prevent the cell from mutating or passing on bad DNA. And he read about how cancer knocked down those checkpoints, lowered the cell's defenses, and let the mistakes pass through uncorrected. And soon enough, the whole cell was sick. And, not long after that, a tumor formed, an evil little bubble of cancerous cells, corrupted by its own mistakes.

And if the conditions were right, the cells didn't stop at that one tumor. More would grow. And spread. And interrupt the body's processing step by step, an avalanche of misery, one that could kill a forty-five-year-old woman who used to be healthy and hold barbeques and plan her dream retirement to Texas – all because of a pesky mutation that ruined one cell's ability to make sure it was doing its job right.

Olivia Pope was Fitz's mutation. And it was on his emotion gene. And the effects were, well, disastrous.

He went from admiration, to affection, to lust, to love, all before his brain could even make the connection. And when it did, it was already too late. The love was everywhere, everywhere, inside every inch of him.

There was no way to stop it. He was terminal.

* * *

Oh, but he was so _happy_.

So happy that he tried to fire her, because it was getting dangerous, how happy he was when she was around. Only when it was too late did he realize what this could do to him. To his campaign. To his marriage.

And the worst part of it was, he could have accepted that it was only a fleeting crush, and moved along. He could have blamed the bumpy trips cooped up in the van, the fast food and long lonely nights, the limited sleep and the endless days, the emotional stress that came with campaigning and simultaneously beginning to give up on his marriage. He could have explained to himself that his feelings for Olivia were a defense mechanism to get him through a tough time.

Except, he caught Olivia's eye sometimes, when she herself was tired and vulnerable – and he could swear he saw, for the briefest moment, a mirror of his own mad desire inside of her.

And it made him so hatefully, hideously, hopelessly happy.

* * *

From there, it unraveled fast. In a flash, it seemed, Fitz had become _that guy_. The guy whose heart beat for someone who did not sleep beside him every night. The guy who had confirmed the cliché about sleazy politicians. The guy who ran for president by day, and became a helpless beggar by night, at the mercy of Olivia Pope.

She was one of the main architects of his campaign. He had worked very hard to make all of this work, of course, but he knew he couldn't have done it without her. She ran him. She had all the power. And now she had his heart on top of that.

She may not have known it at first, but she wore him down, and so when he reached the end of the line, and he realized how he felt about her, he began to wear _her_ down. Took advantage of every opportunity he had to get a moment with her.

The interesting part was that she broke a lot faster than him. She was more brittle than she looked. Generally she was Gladiator – that was the nickname he had given her one day, Gladiator, when he saw her verbally sparring with a nosy reporter – but with him, she was also just Olivia. And when it was night and they were exhausted and there was no one around to watch them, she looked up at him with her big doe eyes, and she didn't talk statistics, she only stared at him, and he could swear that what was left of his heart had melted, melted like the popsicles he sometimes left out on top of the fridge that became sticky red sugar puddles to be cleaned up by some poor hapless volunteer because he was too busy campaigning to eat them.

He melted for her, and slowly, slowly, she softened, and then melted too. The tough exterior cracked, to reveal the messiness inside.

* * *

The first night he slept with Olivia was also the first night he came alive again.

Though he was a Republican, he had never been any great shakes with the Bible. Faith in God – faith in anything, really – had never been easy for him. He was almost grateful that Sally Langston played the God card so heavily that he couldn't use it, because he would have found it a particularly difficult act to maintain.

But that was the thing about Olivia. The first night he had alone with her, the first night he gave himself to her, the first night he forgot about reality and consequences and surrendered to her—that's when he got an inkling about what Sally Langston and the rest of the Religious Right always talked about.

He finally understood about destiny, about purpose. Because this, this was what was meant to be. Him, and her, together, always. For days and days after that night, he was constantly visited by the sudden, bizarre desire to start dancing in front of one of the millions of cameras that followed him around everyday, screaming the truth to the world.

 _I'm in love with Olivia Pope!_ It was a song on an endless loop inside his chest, going along to the rhythm of his heart. A song that tasted sweeter than summer rain.

 _I'm in love with Olivia Pope!_ Fitz was not sure if he believed in God—but he believed in Olivia. And it was enough.

* * *

The air was electric. It was a miracle that no one figured it out. He tried to be discreet – and so did she, though she was far better at it than he was – but the way his blood surged when he looked at her, he was sure someone could tell. When Cyrus, or one of the other senior staff approached him with a serious look on their face, wanting a chat, Fitz was almost afraid that they were coming to bust him and Olivia for what they'd done. He half expected it in the morning paper for at least two months.

But no one knew. No one, not even Mellie. Mellie, who seemed to be fading like a ghost these days, in comparison to Olivia, who was so alive and so full of color that it was almost outrageous. Mellie, his wife Mellie, the woman he married, the woman who had borne his children, who slept beside him and didn't really know him. Mellie didn't know.

She seemed to guess, sometimes. The only one who was really in danger of figuring them out. But she didn't _know_. And she was too busy trying to save the campaign to care.

He began to play a little game with himself then. Every time he had to go out in public with Mellie, he pretended it was Olivia. And then he would smile, smile so widely and so genuinely, that Olivia and Cyrus nodded their approval, delighted that he was playing his part.

It was madness, pure madness. But Fitz had been a goner for so long that it stopped fazing him. He carried his secret around like a glowing talisman, a treasure to cling to when the campaign or Mellie started to get to him.

Olivia Pope. Olivia. Livvie. Liv. _Liv._

When they finally got on first name/nickname terms, Fitz settled on calling her Liv because that's exactly what he had started doing when she walked into his life.

* * *

There was only one way the affair could go – forward. As the campaign intensified, as the last days unfolded, as the pressure mounted, as he got so exhausted that he sometimes just wanted to throw in the towel and run away, he barreled forward like a speeding train with Olivia Pope. They sailed right over the cliff and never looked back.

So, this was love. The thing the pop songs tried to capture but never could. The thing that ignited people's hearts and inspired them to craziness. The thing that people killed for, love. He had thought he knew what it was. But Liv, as usual, proved him wrong.

It was the most exquisite pain, this love. She kissed him, and gripped his hair in her fists, and she filled him up, she made him whole. And then they couldn't find times or places to rendezvous for a few days, and it was like he was emptied out again, left empty and starving until the next time he could taste her.

And when he got her again, he drank her in like a dying man, like she was his only savior, his very life force. There was never enough of her, never. Any flat surface in the vicinity, and she was on it within seconds, and they were ripping off each other's clothes. It was violent, and raw, and reckless; it was everything, _everything_. She was everything. The only thing that mattered.

And when it was over, when it was done, when they collapsed into the blankets and lay together, exhausted and feverish and spent and exhilarated, he held her close to him, and kissed her shoulder, tasting the salt of her sweat. And then he kissed her lips, kissed her long and tender and sweet, savoring that last hit, the one that was going to get him through the next few excruciatingly cold nights beside Mellie.

It was Livvie's smell that he missed the most, when they slept apart. As a lawyer, she always wore expensive perfume, sharp and sophisticated; but when the day had worn her down, her real smell began to poke through the perfume. Like cinnamon, spicy and sweet. But even so—she smelled like sin.

Any sense of right and wrong that Fitz had ever had, fled his body upon Liv's arrival. But even so, he lay beside her, listening to the night, listening to her breathe, and sometimes the scope of this, the wrongness of it, dawned somewhere in the back of his head.

He was a married man running for president, yet behind closed doors, he was an emotional slave to Olivia Pope. It was the stuff of tabloid gossip and daytime soaps, it was completely and utterly ridiculous—and yet it was the truest love he'd never known.

As a politician, he had to ask himself The Big Question all the time: is it acceptable to do the wrong thing for the right reasons? Do the means justify the ends?

Did this affair justify the way it gave him the strength to face this campaign and make the country a better place? Was it fair, to ask him to live half alive for the sake of campaign imagery—could he break this rule, because it was a bad one?

He and Mellie had talked divorce before. For a while, it had seemed a real possibility. Today, this minute, if he could, he would divorce her. In his head, he already had. So did that make this okay? Did the fact that their marriage was, by all intents and purposes, over, make it all right for him to move on?

Did his happiness matter to anyone at all?

All night, as Liv drifted off to sleep in his arms, he thought about these things, and hated himself for the impossible situation this had put him in, and hated the world for being cruel enough to wait this long to meet his soulmate.

Because that's what Livvie was, his soulmate. It was sappy, but truer than any other thought that passed through Fitz's head at three in the morning, delirious with exhaustion and love for Olivia Pope.

She was it, she was the one. He finally knew who he wanted to be—and it wasn't necessarily the President of the United States anymore. He wanted to be Livvie's Fitz. Livvie's, and no one else's.

In a way, he almost hoped that he would lose. Retire out of the public eye, divorce Mellie, and be Livvie's husband. Livvie, who loved him too. Livvie, who had taken over his life and stolen his heart and would not, could not, give it back.

* * *

Of course, he didn't lose the election. He won. He won, and he became president, and when CNN made the announcement, Fitz and Mellie and Sally and Cyrus and the rest of the staff jumped to its feet, and roared with excitement, and hugged him, and poured champagne, and partied the rest of the night away, released the anticipation and exhaustion that had fueled them all for so long.

But when he heard the result, the first person Fitz looked at was Livvie. She, too, was on her feet, beaming, clapping, cheering. She, too, looked first to Fitz, and threw her arms up in the air, threw her head back, let herself revel in their achievement for one beautiful carefree second.

He wanted to hug her first, and then never stop hugging her, but that wasn't the way it was supposed to go.

He hugged Mellie first, Mellie who was in paroxysms of delight over her new position as First Lady. And then Cyrus, who had moved heaven and earth along with Livvie to get this to happen. And then, _then,_ finally, Livvie came up to take her turn.

"Congratulations, Mr. President," she whispered in his ear, sending a shiver down his spine.

"Couldn't have done it without you, Liv," he whispered back.

He could actually hear her smiling, could feel the racing pulse of her heart through his jacket, because it beat in time with his own racing heart.

"I am so happy for you." And she was, she really was.

He thought about that, when he lay in bed that night, after drinking far too much champagne and settling in beside Mellie, who was already snoring. He wondered whether Liv had considered the other possibility—the one in which he lost. The one in which he might have been able to be with her as fully as he wanted to.

He figured, though, that she hadn't considered that possibility. Not because she didn't want to be with him, but because she was Olivia Pope. She never lost. When she went into battle, she always emerged victorious.

She had made his dream come true – he was now the President of the United States – but then, there's that caveat about dreams. How when they come true, they are bittersweet, mixed blessings at best.

* * *

The night after he was elected, he shook off his guard and spent the night with Liv in her hotel room. Mellie never even stirred when he left their bed. He wasn't sure what he would have done if she _had_ stirred, though. The only thought in his mind was that he had to see Livvie, he had to spend the night with her.

She opened the door, and he kissed her right there, and she bit his lip and asked him if he was crazy, kissing her like that where anyone could walk down the hall and see them. But he just grinned, and kissed her again, and she wrenched herself away again, sighing, shaking her head.

"You are the president now," she said, her voice strained as she let him in and locked the door. "You can't just…do this."

"Do what, come over? You can come over then."

"You can't kiss me where we're visible. Damnit, Fitz, you can't kiss me at all."

His heart went cold at the thought. "What do you mean?"

"I mean, this can't go on," she said, very seriously. She led him into the main body of her hotel room, and sat down on the bed, brushing her curls out of her face. She was wearing her oldest nightdress, the faded baby-blue one with flowers, the one she wore when the rest of her night things are in the laundry, or if she wanted something friendly and comfortable.

She rubbed her eyes, and he only now appreciated, in the limited lamp-light, how worn she was. She'd washed off the make-up, so he could see the dark-circles, brilliant as bruises beneath her eyes. And she had lost weight, too—her collarbones were sharp, and her knees were knobby-looking, and her back curled inward, like it was too tired to hold her up straight anymore.

He came to sit beside her, and gathered her up in his arms, but she wriggled and tried to get free.

"No, Fitz, this isn't okay," she said, getting up, pacing in circles like she did when she was trying to come up with a battle plan. "It was never okay. But before, you were governor, and we could get away with it. But now, you are the president. You are the leader of the free world. You cannot keep this up, you cannot. It will ruin you if they find out."

"Liv—"

"I'm serious, Fitz, I will not be the _other woman_ to the president of this country. I cannot be that person."

"Liv—"

"You need to go. Now. Does Mellie know where you are?"

" _Liv_ —"

"And what about your guard detail, do they know that you sneaked out? They're going to come looking for you, and—"

" _Olivia_."

And there it was, his presidential voice. The hard-line, listen-to-me-now voice that came out on the campaign trail when the opposition reached a fever-pitch – the one that meant business. At once, Olivia stopped, visibly shocked. He took great pleasure in that silence; he liked reminding her that she wasn't the only one who called shots around here.

"Liv, neither Mellie nor my guard know where I am. I shook them off. It's okay. It's just us."

"It can't be. I told you, this can't go on."

She stared him down then, not as Olivia Pope, Gladiator Woman, but as Livvie, Fitz's Livvie, the one who gave herself to him so desperately, so willingly, every night they could slip away. Fitz's Livvie, with the large, lovely brown eyes, and the quivering lip; Fitz's Livvie, who let him hold her in his arms and slept against his chest and made them both feel like they were at home.

And so he melted again, and he stopped being President Grant, and he was just Fitz again, Livvie's Fitz, a man hopelessly in love with a woman he was not married to.

"I don't know how to go on without you, Livvie," he admitted, rising to his feet and standing in front of her. He gently tilted her chin up with his index finger, and he let himself linger there, because she was warm and soft and she was Livvie and she was all he wanted.

"We'll have to find a way," she said.

"Can I stay tonight?"

She wanted to say no, but the word never came out. She was just staring at him with those eyes of hers, like she wanted him to make the decision for them both – but they knew what decision he would make, if left to his own devices.

So he leaned in, slowly, slowly, and let his forehead rest against hers. Their breath intermingled in that tiny space between their mouths, as they contemplated this and what it would mean.

But she was weak, and he was weak, and together they closed the distance between them, and put off the difficult conversation for another day.

* * *

If lines were blurred during their days on the campaign trail, they were impossible to tell apart, once he took office.

It became difficult to figure out what was real and what was not, especially in the first few days, settling in, learning the job. Sometimes, the presidency was the realest thing in his life, and everything else was just a distraction, because this, this was what he was meant to do, this was the thing he had worked towards for his entire professional career—this was his whole life. Everything else was just a distraction.

But then Livvie would waltz into the room, and she would catch Fitz's eye, and the next thing he knew, they were in their spot, the secret room in the Oval Office where he had no doubt other presidents did similar things in years past—and they were together, and they were kissing as though their lives depended on it, and she was the realest thing in his life, and he couldn't remember why he ran for office in the first place, if it meant he couldn't have her.

He was so many different people, and the stakes were so high. He was Commander in Chief, making decisions about events all over the world. He was the President, signing in law, making the tough decisions. He was Mellie's husband, the father to their children. But then he was also Livvie's Fitz, the one who dropped everything to spend an hour in the office, or in the garden, with her, coming alive only when she was pressed up against him and his tongue was in her mouth and her heart was beating against his.

In all of that, he felt fragmented, lost. His life took on a surreal quality—like it was a dream, a dream in which he was one small chess piece carried off by a great typhoon, down a path he could not fathom.

His life was still handled—even more so now than it was during the campaign. He could scarcely imagine what Cyrus was keeping from him. Or Sally Langston. Or the CIA. Or anyone else who now worked for him. And when all of those hats were put away for the night, there was Mellie, Mellie and their cold bed and their inability to look each other in the eye anymore, or have a conversation that meant anything.

When he zoomed out like that, when he lay in bed at night in his new White House bedroom looking down on his life from a bird's eye view, it was all so profoundly absurd. He had fought for years to attain the hardest, loneliest job in the world, and now he was there, and he felt lost, and he was married to a woman he did not love. From here, yeah, Livvie was the realest thing in his life and he wanted to run away from his entire life and build a new one with her, one that mattered, one that was beautiful, and happy, and fulfilling.

But then, from the same bird's eye view, he could see that he was also just a powerful, pouting man with a mistress. It was all a matter of interpretation.

Still--no matter how he looked at it, no matter how optimistic he tried to be for his own sake, he understood that there was no way, _no way_ , that this could end well.

* * *

More so at that point, than ever before, guilt loomed over Fitz and Olivia each time they met up for their fix. He kissed her, and kissed her, and kissed her, and she let him because it was what she wanted too, and it was hungry and wild and desperate—but inevitably, when it was over, when they'd had their fix, they were softened and worn down and simply exhausted. They sat together in secluded corners, trying to figure out what to do. How to fight this, the one problem Olivia Pope could not fix.

Sometimes, work crept into these conversations. As the White House Director of Communications, she had plenty of things she had to run by him, decisions he had made that she needed to ask him about. And sometimes, she got angry with him, about their relationship and about work, and he yelled at her for her impertinence, and she yelled at him for his incompetence, and they had to actively work to lower their voices before someone heard. The stress of the affair and the stress of the job left them frazzled and hostile, all bitterness and hard edges.

But when she got like that, when those big doe eyes of hers were narrowed in frustration, his anger swelled and swelled and broke and he suddenly couldn't stand it anymore. He hated to fight with her, hated to waste their precious time together doing anything except loving her.

So then he would pull her close, and he would whisper, "Come back to me, Liv." And that became their signal, then, to reign it in and pull it back and remember who they were and how they felt and what this was. How she was his Livvie and he was her Fitz and no matter how angry they were, or how hard they pushed each other away sometimes, this was a connection that never weakened.

Her shoulders would slump, and she deflated, and she put her head against his shoulder and let him hold her, let him whisper her name into her hair. Let him whisper that he loved her—over and over and over again, because the magic never left those words, no matter how many times he said them. And he said them so willingly, so gratefully, like he had waited all his life to say these things. He gave her the words like gifts, like peace offerings.

 _Come back to me, Liv._ Because that was what he did when she was around—live. He wanted her to be soft with him, soft like she never was in the office or in the press room or when handling a potential legal disaster, because he needed her. Needed her like he had never needed anyone or anything.

 _Come back to me, Liv_. And she did, every time. Because he wasn't the only one whose sanity depended on them being together.

* * *

But even as Fitz needed Livvie like he needed the air in his lungs, the situation became more and more toxic and complicated, as his term marched on.

It was hard to keep the secret. It was hard to pretend that he was focused on his job or his marriage when all he was focused on was when he could see Livvie again. He loved her, but he loved her dangerously, recklessly. He got greedy. And she, too, was slowly losing her sanity, because it was becoming abundantly obvious that there was no happy ending for the quagmire they were lost in.

Because it came to a point where the sex wasn't enough. Where hiding in corners and ripping off their clothes like horny teenagers got stale and frustrating. Fitz went to his White House dinners and galas and fundraising events, and he didn't want Mellie holding his arm, he wanted Livvie.

He ate dinner with the world's most powerful leaders, and sometimes they said something so absurd that he wished Livvie was beside him, laughing about it, sharing the moment with him. He wanted Livvie to get all dressed up in something silky and beautiful, and go places with him, and fall asleep with him without having to plan it extensively beforehand.

He wanted to be spontaneous with her. He wanted to _date_ her. He wanted to take her out for ice cream on a beautiful summer afternoon. He wanted her to play with his children, and watch movies with him into the night, and wake up beside her and ask her about her dreams. Somehow, all those things got lost between them, and left them as empty as ever. Empty, and ravenous, and so deeply unhappy.

Even Livvie stopped feeling real to him, their relationship an empty shell of aching passion without any of the real intimacy that they craved. And so Fitz had to wonder—was any part of his life real at all?

* * *

She tried, one night. Livvie managed to make it seem as though she and Fitz were meeting ambassadors from Egypt for dinner one night, and they went out to a nice restaurant, all dressed up, him in his tux and her in a luscious maroon dress. And once there, they were alone – save for the usual entourage of Secret Service guards – but they were fairly easy to forget, with Livvie sitting right in front of him, all his for the evening.

They stayed as long as they could, talking, talking. And it was the easiest, happiest time he had had with anyone since becoming president. He was Fitz again, someone he could recognize, and it was so nice to see that man again, as battle-weary as he was.

But when they said good-bye afterward, and he went to the White House and she went to her apartment, and he had to go home to Mellie and invent stories about his dinner with the ambassadors, he felt as though any and all life he had left inside of him had flowed out.

In a way, he almost wished that they didn't spend that evening together, eating and enjoying each other's company and pretending to be normal. Because having that small taste of reality made everything else feel even sadder and more surreal than before.

* * *

He should have known then, that their time was coming to an end, but of course he didn't figure that out, didn't bother to think that far ahead. He clung so hard to whatever scraps they could give each other that he forgot who she was and that there was another option—not being together anymore. In hindsight, it's silly. But when it happened, he was flabbergasted.

She was smart about it, leaving him a note and stealing off into the night before he could run after her and drag her back and ask her what the hell she was doing, leaving him alone like this. She knew him well; she knew he would make a scene, and that wasn't what she wanted. She wanted a quick exit, a clean break.

But the thing that she didn't understand was, whether it was messy or clean, it was still a _break_. It was still a rupture in him and in her and it rattled them both to their core, long after she blocked every phone number he could think of to use, long after they went their separate ways.

There were so many excellent, rational reasons she could give, for why she had done what she had done. The affair was toxic, it was true. Mellie had come to know about it, and could become a liability-- also true. He was the President, and he had his own family, and he risked the political career he had spent his whole life building, every minute he spent with her behind closed doors. All true, all good reasons.

And yet he knew she left for personal reasons--which somehow made it worse. Because reason, he could deal with; reason, he could wriggle out of, with his expensive law degree. The emotional reality of her decision was decidedly more difficult to handle.

It killed him, to see her go. It killed him, that the only time he got to see her was when she was on TV, answering press questions about her resignation. It killed her that he couldn't come up with a reason to make her stay, when she was all he had, when they were supposed to be in this together.

She had gotten him here, she had made his dream come true-- but the dream had changed. Now, the dream could not exist without her by his side.

 _Come back to me, Liv_. He kept trying to call her back, kept trying to make her soft and sweet and his again, kept trying to cling onto the realest thing in his life—but if he managed to get her on the phone at all, Olivia was adamant.

She didn't work for him anymore. She had resigned. She wasn't coming back.

* * *

And now, he is sitting here, and he thinks about their tragic, toxic affair in all its muddled glory, and he is reeling from all the secrets, all the things she never told him about those months, the months he thought he was closest to her. He is reeling because he loves her and because she lied to him and because they weren't fighting for each other anymore. Because she was his and he was hers and they were real, they were magical; because he loves her and she loves him--and it just wasn't enough.

* * *

_Come back to me, Liv. Liv, Livvie, my sweet baby. Come back to me, Liv._

He wants to shake her and yell this at her, break that shell of Gladiator Olivia Pope and find inside of it the woman he loves, because he's tried, he's tried, but he can't figure out how to live without his Liv. Despite the lies, despite the hurt, he wants her back, because she is the realest thing he knows. She is the only thing he knows for sure.

 _Come back to me, Liv_. He says it to himself alone in the dark, like a wish on a star, a last desperate hope. The most powerful man in the world, on his knees.

He can't remember where this started, but he knows where it has ended—and for all the power he wields from his office, he has none of it for himself, not really. He is empty. She took everything and she is gone, and he is still here, missing her. And he can't talk to her. He's driven her away and she doesn't want to hear it and it is all a miserable, miserable mess.

He knows he can't expect a happy ending, but at this point, any kind of ending will do. Because right now, there's no resolution, no closure. Nothing.

* * *

  
_You're bad news, baby you're bad news_   
_I don't care, I like you_   
_And you're bad news_   
_I don't care, I like you_   
_I like you_   



End file.
